In Accommodating the Republic: Use of Taverns in the Early United States, Kirsten Wood explores how Americans' use taverns in their pursuits of happiness helped flesh out the evolving meaning of citizenship in the young United States. In this talk, she looks at the years following the Revolutionary War, when Americans continued to use their neighborhood taverns as sites for gathering and political mobilization. The scope and significance of practices that had been so central to the revolutionary struggle shifted in the early republic, as Americans wrestled with the promise and problems of republican self-government. Although the mid-nineteenth-century temperance movement would soon frame tavern-going as the habit of dangerously shiftless men, in the republic's early decades, entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men—and some women!--went to taverns to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and put republican self-government into practice.